The man who knew Sahir inside out

Sumit Paul

To know a person, one has to swallow the whole world,’ wrote the ever-polemic writer Salman Rushdie. But to know a man like Sahir Ludhianvi, whose 100th birth anniversary falls on March 8, even the world is not enough. One has to swallow the whole universe! Sahir remained an enigma till he breathed his last in 1980. ‘Ik muamma hoon main khud ke liye bhi/Mujhe samjhegi duniya mere jaane ke baad hi,’ (I’m a conundrum even to my own self/The world will understand me once I bid adieu to it), Sahir sent this couplet to his Jalandhar-born friend and composer Muhammad Zahoor Khayyam ‘Hashmi’.

Though temperamental, Sahir interacted with all, but was taciturn. He treated most people in the film industry as acquaintances and only a couple of them as friends. Rafi, Khayyam and composer Ravishankar Sharma (popularly known as Ravi) were his friends. While pursuing a doctorate on Mohammad Rafi, I needed to interview Ravi because he had composed fabulous songs for Rafi.

Since Ravi and Sahir teamed up to create music for 17-odd films, they were extremely close. Ravi told me during an interview that the day Rafi breathed his last (July 31, 1980), Sahir cried and phoned him, ‘Pheeko chala gaya.’

Sahir was perhaps the only man in the film industry who called Rafi by his sobriquet ‘Pheeko’ as both the greats were originally from Punjab. Rafi was from Kotla Sultan Singh in Amritsar. So shaken was Sahir by his younger friend’s death that he lost zeal for life and followed suit after three months.

A chain-smoker, Sahir smoked even while eating. His way of not liking a tune was to exhale rings of smoke at the composer’s face because he insisted that the film score should be composed for his lyrics and not the other way around. Sahir was almost a misanthrope who disliked directors and producers, narrating the background for the songs he was supposed to write. He’d say rather tersely, ‘15 minute se zyada nahin’. Throughout the sessions, he smoked and looked bored. But that bored genius would write, ‘Man re, tu kaahe na dheer dhare’ (Chitralekha, 1964) or ‘Sansaar ki har shai ka itna hi fasana hai’ (Dhund, 1973).

Sahir would tell Ravi, ‘Filmon ke liye gaane likhna doyam darje ka kaam hai’ (writing songs for films is a mediocre task). He hated the ‘condescending’ label of a lyricist because he considered himself a poet and nearly left Bombay in 1965 at the zenith of his career, when he got to know that despite including his immortal creation, ‘Man re, tu kaahe na dheer dhare’ in the syllabus of MA Urdu at Calcutta University, the Senate decided to remove it because it was a film song!

His finest creation was included as a part of South Asian literature by the University of Reading in South England in 1980. Alas, the poet-lyricist had already left the world. Though over four decades have elapsed, Sahir’s poetry still stirs the hearts and minds of listeners. By the way, Ravi’s 95th birth anniversary was on March 3.

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